Footnotes & scrolling

[Lamprocles]

With a few enhancements Writer could replace InDesign as the best desktop publisher available to amateurs and save the world millions!
I work with large documents, say over 500 pages, in two or three languages and thousands of footnotes. My so far insurmountable problems with OO have been: A. formatting the space between a text and its footnotes. A paragraph of text must be followed by X lines of footnotes before the next bit of text begins. This flow cannot be dependent on page breaks and must flow from one page to the next. Nothing in OO succeeds in making these spaces uniform, nor the space between a text and its notes. B. navigating the text using scrolling I find that I do either leaps or crashes. Scrolling takes too long for proofreading as does the equally shaky 'next page' up or down option. Perhaps my awaited new Mac with 16G of RAM will overcome this problem.

[jrkrideau]

W A paragraph of text must be followed by X lines of footnotes before the next bit of text begins. This flow cannot be dependent on page breaks and must flow from one page to the next.

I don't quite understand this. Are you saying that you have one paragraph per page of main body text and the rest is footnotes--no that does not sound correct. Can you provide a short example?

B. navigating the text using scrolling I find that I do either leaps or crashes. Scrolling takes too long for proofreading as does the equally shaky 'next page' up or down option. Perhaps my awaited new Mac with 16G of RAM will overcome this problem.

It may but I don't think you should be getting crashes with that size of file. Others here routinely handle files that large I believe. You might want to try resetting the user profile
which seems to cure a lot of strange behaviours in AOO.

If it really the size you may want to have a look at using a master document approach.

[Lamprocles]

A paragraph can contain 100 or 500 words; a paragraph may 2 notes or 20. Thus the annotated paragraphs are disparate and randomly sized. One paragraph per page produces too many 'white' pages. A cold-typesetter has no problem giving the pages a completed look by running the annotated text continuously, from page to page, with uniform spacing.

I will edit the profile. Many thanks!!

[RoryOF]

A cold-typesetter has intelligence and discrimination, which are not yet built in to any word processor.

OpenOffice should permit the annotated text to flow continuously, placing as many footnotes on the page as possible and continuing them on the next; Your case may be the one which breaks the camel's back, like the proverbial last straw. Typically one might have a very small number of short footnotes per page; a large number of verbose footnotes may require reconsideration of your style of setting. Perhaps using a "diplomatic" format might be better, where the text is in a wider column, and the footnotes are positioned as sidenotes in a separate column.

[Lamprocles]

Yes, I think I have exceeded OO capabilities, but I also think it is good to tell the developers where the programme can be improved. OO is still a good bit better than either Pages or Word - if it weren't for the pesky scrolling issue!
I have found the Styles robust, but have not found templates reliable and the Master document approach is not too malleable for a complex document. Both templates and Masters could use some better documentation.

[Hagar Delest]

There are no developers here, we are just users like you.
If you want to contact them, use the mailing list: http://openoffice.apache.org/mailing-li ... ist-public

[jrkrideau]

Yes, I think I have exceeded OO capabilities, but I also think it is good to tell the developers where the programme can be improved. OO is still a good bit better than either Pages or Word - if it weren't for the pesky scrolling issue!
I have found the Styles robust, but have not found templates reliable and the Master document approach is not too malleable for a complex document. Both templates and Masters could use some better documentation.

I am still not sure what you are doing but at a guess you need something a lot more powerful than a standard word processor. Possibly legal text?

I'd suggest having a look at some of the LaTeX packages. Not a fun way to go but likely to have the kind of options and control needed.